Introduction to special section 2 : anthropology and character

The authors thank The Ladislav Holy Memorial Trust for sponsoring the original Anthropology of Character conference, held at the University of St Andrews in 2016The introductory essay to this second special section on Anthropology and Character seeks to extend an exploration of the relevance of the character concept, in part by looking beyond its exclusive attribution to the human subject. While continuing to develop the insights of previous discussions about both the emic and etic status of the concept, in obvious fields such as the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of Christianity, the authors here ask what difference it makes to begin analysis with a description of non‐human characters. This includes calling our attention to the objects of character – its specific materialisations. By reflecting on various examples offered by the special section's contributors, such as the characterful nature popularly assigned to animals, to scientific units of behaviour and to historic places and buildings, new questions are identified for an emergent project on Anthropology and Character. This leads to a broader examination of characterisation as an enactment on the page (or stage) but also in the world, and on the role of audience (or reader) in the recognition of a character's distinctiveness. Finally, we ask what consequences these reflections might have for the ways in which we treat characterisation as a feature of anthropological writing.PostprintPeer reviewe

The Third Wave And The Third World:C. Peter Wagner, John Wimber, and the Pedagogy of Global Renewal in the Late Twentieth Century

While a great deal of social science literature has examined the explosion of pentecostal and charismatic Christianity in the Global South as well as conservative and anti-modern forms of resurgent Christianity in the United States, little work has been done to investigate the causal effects of the former on the latter. Drawing from existing literature, interviews, and archives, this article contributes to filling that gap by arguing that in the mid-twentieth century, evangelical missionary concerns about competition from global Pentecostalism led to an intellectual crisis at the Fuller School of World Missions; this crisis in turn influenced important Third Wave figures such as John Wimber and C. Peter Wagner and is linked to key moments and developments in their thought and pedagogy.</jats:p

What is an individual? The view from Christianity

The introduction to this special section of Hau focuses on the tensions between individualism and dividualism as modes of personhood; while this essay approaches this foundational anthropological question through recent debates in the anthropology of Christianity, its larger concern is to reopen the question of in/dividualism in order to see whether we can imagine different relations between these two forms of being. As part of this discussion, this introductory essay rehearses the history of individualism and dividualism as concepts, reviews the current controversy over partible Christian personhood in Melanesia, and attends to recent debates about the relation between religion, the nation, and the state in Papua New Guinea that have followed from defacement of the Papuan Parliament Building. Synthesizing this material, we argue for a shift in framing of the question of in/dividualism. Rather than viewing dividualism and individualism as merely heuristics, or as vying but extant modes of organizing the subject, we suggest that in/dividualisms are best thought of as actualizations of a unitary underlying generative problematic. This is a problematic not merely for the anthropologist but for the anthropologist’s interlocutors as well; and as this problematic is worked through in various locales, we should expect not merely a wide variety of dividual and individual crystallizations of the person but also we should anticipate particular ethnographic milieus expressing complex emergent relations between the various extant dividualisms and individualisms